


Möbius Strip

by RocknVaughn



Category: Humans (TV)
Genre: Angst, Drama, F/M, Fluff, Leotilda, Mystery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-14
Updated: 2018-05-14
Packaged: 2019-05-04 23:52:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14604504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RocknVaughn/pseuds/RocknVaughn
Summary: Written for the Humans Predictions challenge on Tumblr.This is based on knowledge that has been released in SPOILERS to date (prior to the airing date of 1st episode of Series 3) and expounded on from there.Pretty much includes all the Leo spoilers Colin Morgan gave away in his audio interview, plus some from the Behind the Scenes AMC video.The character death mentioned is speculation on my part rather than based on spoilers.~0~What starts out as a regular day for Leo at the Hawkins house ends as anything but.





	Möbius Strip

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, this was not the story I meant to write. This was supposed to be a fluffy, cute fic of Leo interacting with Sophie...and then this happened. 
> 
> Sorry, not sorry.

~0~

 

Leo was dressed in a t-shirt and sweatpants, lounging against the headboard of his bed reading when there came a soft rapping at his door. Leo marked his place with a finger and closed the edges of the book over it as he responded, “Yes?”

The door creaked open and Laura peered around it. “Did I wake you?” she asked in a polite-but-sincere tone.

Leo subconsciously sat up straighter and replied, “No. I tend to be up by dawn. Old habits die hard, I guess.” He tilted his head to the side a little. “Can I help you with something?”

“Actually, yes.” Laura pushed the door open wider and stepped into the room. Faint clanking of cutlery against stoneware filtered up the stairs, signifying Toby and Sophie at breakfast. Mattie would have already set off for Uni by now. Leo tended to avoid the crowd, preferring the solitude of eating alone once the other Hawkins family members had set off for the day. 

“I was wondering if you would mind being here for when Sophie's school lets out? Toby has football practice after school today and Mattie and I won't be back until later.”

Leo's eyes widened in surprise. As his stunned silence stretched on awkwardly, Laura explained, “You wouldn't have to watch over her, per se. I just like knowing that she’s safe and has someone here to help her in case she needs anything.”

Belatedly realizing that he had forgotten to answer, Leo nodded vigorously. “Yes, of course I wouldn't mind, Laura. I was just surprised that you would ask, after…”

“Oh, that?” Laura waved her hand as if to indicate it didn’t matter. “No harm done.”

 

_All Leo had wanted was to help, to do something to earn his keep in the Hawkins household, which was why he hadn't understood at the time why Laura had got upset with his leading Sophie to school without telling her in advance. But once Mattie had explained about how school security and approved caretakers worked, Leo had felt stupid and foolish. Yet another thing about being a human he didn't understand._

_“Leo, no one is blaming you,” Mattie had said then. “You weren't to know.”_

_“Yeah, I'm just a stupid ex-cyborg that doesn't know how to people,” he responded bitterly._

_“No,” Mattie ran a soothing hand down his arm as she explained, “you didn't know because you didn't go to public school and would have had no experience with it.”_

_It was amazing how Mattie always seemed to know what to say to make him feel better._

 

“As long as you're sure…” Leo agreed uncertainly.

“I'm sure you'll do fine,” Laura reassured with a smile.

“Do you want me to collect her as well?”

Laura shook her head. “The paperwork’s been turned in, but the change isn't official yet. I'll just send Stanley with the car, and he can drop her off to you.”

“All right, Laura.”

“Thank you, Leo,” she said with a nod.

Leo was still smiling long after Laura had left for work.  

 

~0~

  
Hours later, a key turned in the front door latch and then Leo heard Mattie’s sister call out, “Leo? Are you here?”

Leo looked up from the code he was studying on his laptop. “In the kitchen.” He looked over his shoulder in time to see Sophie waving broadly at someone out the door.

Her loud proclamation of “It’s okay, Stanley...He’s here!” made Leo bow his head low over his keyboard again, biting at his cheek to fight back a grin.

When he’d first met Sophie, he’d hardly noticed the young, sweet, and bubbly girl. But now...bit by bit, Leo could see the intelligence and biting wit that so defined Mattie pushing to the surface with Sophie, too. With the role models she had in her mother and older sister, Leo had no doubts that the youngest Hawkins girl would be just as formidable one day.

“Hullo, Leo,” Sophie said as she dropped her backpack into a chair opposite him and shrugged out of her school blazer. “What are you doing?”

“Working on some computer code Mattie asked me to look at.”

Sophie slung her discarded blazer over the back of the chair holding her backpack and opened the door to the refrigerator. “I’m going to have some juice,” she announced, reaching in to pull out a pack. She stopped and looked over her at Leo. “Would you like one?”

Leo looked up at her, startled. He was still quite unused to anyone asking him things, let alone receiving the kindness the entire Hawkins family showed him on a daily basis. “Oh...erm…”

Sophie nodded once as if he’d answered her and grabbed out another juice pack. “Here,” she said, placing it on the table next to his elbow, “You like apple, right?”

Leo nodded. He wrestled the little cellophane packet off the side of the container and then fought to remove the tiny, curved straw.

Without so much as a by-your-leave, Sophie took the packet from Leo’s hands, pulled out the straw, and poked it through the opening on the juice pack. “Here,” she said, sliding the drink closer to him.

Leo didn’t know if he should be insulted or amused by Sophie’s unsolicited intervention, but he decided on the latter. “Thanks,” he said with a smile and, more for her benefit than for quenching his own thirst, picked up the container and sipped at it.

Sophie nodded once and took a drink from her own juice pack. “Would you mind the telly? There’s a show on at half three that I like to watch.”

“No, go right ahead.”

Sophie padded into the other room, and Leo turned his attention back to his laptop.

 

~0~

 

Some time later, Leo was startled by Sophie’s sudden appearance at his elbow. She was staring in a way that made him wonder just how long she’d been there studying him.

Without preamble, she asked, “Are you good with sums?”

“Erm...yes?”

“Would you help me with mine, then?”

Leo closed his laptop with a nod and slid it aside. “Sure, if you’d like.”

Sophie clambered up onto the chair beside him, perching on her knees as she rummaged through the contents of her backpack. Finally, she pulled out a green folder and her pencil case, setting her still opened pack onto the floor.

“We’re learning multiplication tables,” she said morosely as she opened the folder to her homework sheet.

“I see that.”

“I don’t understand why it’s still considered sums, though. How is this supposed to be easier than just adding things?”

Leo pulled over his own notepad and flipped the page over to reveal a blank one. “Multiplication is a fast way of doing sums.”

“But _how_ is it easier?” Sophie asked plaintively, a hint of a whine underlying her frustration.

A fragment of a memory clouded Leo’s vision for a moment-- _he and Niska, hunched together over a scratch pad_ \--and he tried to grasp it, to hold onto it, but it evaporated like gossamer and smoke. He shook his head to clear away its remnants and focused instead on Sophie’s inquisitive face.

“Let me show you.” He wrote down a couple of figures. “Do you know what five added to five is?”

“Ten.”

“Right. And what would you have if you added another five?”

“Fifteen.”

Leo added more to the column of numbers. “And another five?”

“Twenty.”

“And one more?”

“Twenty-five.”

“Yes. Now, do you see how long our equation is becoming?”

Sophie nodded.

“This is where knowing your multiplication tables is useful. Because if you already had memorised your 5 tables, you’d know that five, five times is twenty-five. You would just _know_ the answer instead of having to do all these sums, do you see?”

“Yes, but it would only take me a couple of extra seconds to just add them, so what difference does it make?” Sophie huffed.

 _Ah, so stubbornness is also a Hawkins family trait, I see,_ Leo thought. “Well, yes...on small numbers, it’s not much more time. But what about large numbers? What if you wanted to know how much it would be to add 27, thirty-five times? Or thirty-five _hundred_ times? That is when knowing the shortcuts is essential.”

Leo wrote down the larger of the two equations and solved it, explaining his actions to Sophie step by step. “Now do you see?” he asked her patiently.

Sophie nodded, looking at Leo with more than a little bit of awe.

He slid the worksheet in front of Sophie and handed her a pencil from her case. “Now you try.”

Leo watched--and occasionally corrected--Sophie as she leaned over her paper and worked, biting at her bottom lip in concentration as she wrote. When she finished the page and set down her pencil, Leo asked, “See? That wasn’t so hard after all, now was it?”

Sophie shook her head but blurted out, “But how are _you_ so good at sums? Because Mum said you didn’t go to school.”

“I didn’t go to school like you do,” Leo corrected, “but I still learnt. I was taught at home.”

Sophie cocked her head to the side. “Who taught you? Was it your dad?”

“No, it was Niska.”

“ _Niska_ was your tutor?” Sophie repeated incredulously.

Again, the hazy memory resurfaced in Leo’s mind. “Yes.”

“Do you think she would teach me, too?” Sophie asked in a flurry of excitement.

Leo shook his head. “I doubt it.”

Sophie seemed put out by his answer. “Well, why not?”

“Because she’s got her own life now. Because she’s moved on. Because our time in my father’s house wasn’t very happy for her.”

“Why wasn’t she happy?”

It was a good question, and one that Leo had no answers to. “I’m not sure. You would have to ask her that.”

“She never stops by anymore,” Sophie put her elbows on the table and propped her head in her hands. “None of them do, except for Mia. And even when she does, she’s always locked away with Mum. She barely even looks at me.” She looked at Leo sadly. “Does she not like me anymore?”

“I think she still does..like you. Like _us_. It’s just that…” Leo had struggled with this selfsame question of late. “Things are very difficult for the Synths right now. They are struggling for the most basic rights and protections. That is what she is focused on at the minute, gaining the right to survive. And perhaps, seeing us already having those protections...is hard.”

“Is that why Max made you leave?”

Sophie’s question blindsided Leo. He stared at her blankly for several moments, his brain trying to sort out his unfamiliar and conflicting emotions. “No,” Leo said at last, his voice hoarse. “It was because he believed it was unsafe for me to stay.”

“But why would he think that? You’d been there for a year already.”

“Well, after the attack on Flash and Hubert--”

Sophie looked alarmed. “What attack? Is Flash okay?”

Leo hadn’t been aware that Sophie even knew who Flash was, or else he would never have mentioned names. _Damn._ Perhaps Laura hadn’t wanted Sophie to know how bad things were out there; what Mia, Max and the others were dealing with...but Leo was not about to be the one to sugarcoat reality to anyone, least of all to Mattie’s own sister.

“No,” he said solemnly. “She isn’t.”

Sophie’s hand fluttered to her heart. “Is she... _dead_?”

Leo nodded.

“Can’t they fix her?”

“No.”

“Poor Max.” Sophie sat with her head bowed for several minutes as Leo squirmed awkwardly beside her, unsure of what to do to comfort her. After a while, Sophie sniffled and wiped her tears onto her sleeve.

“Did the others blame you?”

“Not exactly. But anti-human sentiment was rising among the synths at the Railyard and Max didn’t know if my status as his brother would be enough to save me from harm.”

“It’s awful!”

“What is?”

“All of it! What people are doing to synths. What synths are doing to people. Why can’t we all just get along?”

“That,” Leo said, as he put his arm across the back of Sophie’s chair, “is exactly what your Mum and Mia are working so hard for.”

“Yes, but _I_ want to do something about it.”

“ _What_ do you want to do something about, Soph?” Mattie asked, making both Leo and Sophie turn their heads at the sound. She was just leaning her weight against the front door to shut it.

“The way people and synths treat each other,” Sophie replied seriously. “Everyone should just be nice.”

“Oh, look what you’ve done, Leo,” Mattie teased, causing his cheeks to flush rather becomingly. “You’ve created a budding activist, here!” She mussed up her sister’s hair as she walked by, dropping her keys on the table with a clink.

“Quit it, Mats!” Sophie complained as she tried to straighten out her hair with her fingers. “I’m being serious.”

Mattie leveled a knowing look on her sister. “You might want to start by not getting into fist fights at school, then.”

Sophie crossed her arms across her chest stubbornly. “He deserved it. He said bad things about Mum.”

“Yeah, well,” Mattie drawled, “You’re extremely lucky Mum wasn’t answering her calls today or else I’m sure you’d already be grounded. I still wouldn’t want to be you when she gets home, though.” She sat down at the end of the table nearest to Leo. Nodding toward the door to the living room, she said to Sophie, “Might want to get your telly-watching in while you can.”

Sophie took the hint and rushed off to enjoy her last few moments of television freedom.

“That was a bit harsh, Mattie. Some big sister you are,” he teased, trying to give her a little back from earlier.

“No, that was me being completely serious. Mum is going to be livid once she finds out. Although, if what Soph says is true, she’ll be cheering her on a bit on the inside.”

“And I bet she never got calls like that from school about you…”

“Oh, _never_.”

“As I suspected. Troublemaker from start to finish.”

But Leo’s tease didn’t elicit the response he’d expected. “Yeah, I am,” Mattie agreed dryly. “I sit in class all day, and none of my classmates know they’re in the same room with one of the world’s worst mass murderers.”

Leo laid a hand over hers. “You know that’s not what I meant,” he said softly.

“I know, but it’s still true. Look around you, Leo. All this chaos was my doing.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Leo disagreed. “It was my father’s doing. You might have figured out how to speed things up, but the consciousness code was his. This day was always going to come.”

A shadow passed across Mattie’s features. “You may be more right than you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you finished looking at that piece of code that I gave you?”

“No. I was working on it, but then Sophie wanted help with her homework.”

“You should look at it now.”

Leo glanced over at Mattie, confused and a bit disturbed by her cryptic tone of voice. “Okay.” He dragged his computer back towards himself and lifted the lid.  

As Mattie scooted her chair around the corner of the table to sit beside Leo, his screen flickered back to life. He tapped a few keys to bring up the piece of code in question and studied it. After a couple of minutes, he said, “Seems pretty normal to me.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” Mattie agreed. “At first.” Rummaging through her backpack, she extracted a small thumb drive. “What is the most difficult cypher to break?” she asked Leo, holding up the drive.

“The one that no one knows exists,” Leo replied, as if by rote. It was something his father used to say all the time. “What’s on it?” he asked, motioning toward the drive.

“A code key for a cypher so rare that its existence is only a rumour, despite reports by many of his former colleagues that he used a special code to encrypt his most secret information. Many hackers have tried, but supposedly no one has ever been able to _find_ it, let alone break it. Until now.”

Leo’s head shot up. “You've cracked my father’s cypher.”

“Yes. I figured it out after _months_ of studying the consciousness code.” She placed the drive into Leo’s hand. “Run it.”

With a sense of terrible foreboding, Leo plugged the drive into a USB port and typed in the command. Before his eyes, the code changed to reveal the Easter egg beneath.

 

_Leo_

_51.9564972,-0.3112729_

_Möbius_

 

“Where did you find this?” Leo asked, his eyes still glued to the screen in wonder.

“Hidden in Stanley’s root code.”

Leo turned to stare at Mattie, agog. “ _What_?”

“It’s unique, I’ve checked. This bit of code was uploaded to him six weeks ago, just after you moved in with us.”

Leo’s eyes drifted back to computer, at the message on the screen. “Uploaded from where?”

“Dunno. It was sent through so many filters and firewalls that there was no way to track it.” Mattie grasped Leo’s arm. “Leo, I don't like this. Someone who knows your father's code also knows you’re here and left a calling card for you _in our bleeding synth_! Do you have any idea who it could be or what the message means?”

Leo started to shake his head, but then his eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Wait a minute…” Leo opened another window on his laptop and his fingers flew over the keyboard. He spoke his thoughts aloud as he typed. “I was thinking that the numbers may be coordinates of some kind. And ‘Möbius’...a Möbius strip goes on forever; it just begins again where it would have ended…”

The result of Leo's search made both of them gasp:

 

**The Elster Museum**

**“Where the Future Began”**

 

Leo blanched as he wilted against the back of the chair. “Mattie, I think...I think the message is from my father. _Christ!_  That means he’s still alive.”

Mattie looked just as shell-shocked as he did. “And he’s started all over again. With new synths.”


End file.
